


you surrender your heart

by ariados



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Also: Learning to Love Yourself, Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Pokemon Fusion, Artistic Liberties With Backstories, But Also Found Families, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Galra Keith (Voltron), Growing Up, Human/Pokemon Relationship(s), Keith (Voltron) is a Mess, Lost families, M/M, Pining Keith (Voltron), Pre-Kerberos Mission, Slow Build, Written Pre-Season 5
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-01-28 05:48:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12599588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariados/pseuds/ariados
Summary: In the aftermath of the failed Kerberos mission, Keith doesn’t just lose Shiro. He loses Scizor, hispartner,too.Blood dribbled down Shiro's chin. His smile trembled in the way Keith used to imagine the slow collapse of planetary rings, at first unremarkable, until gravity kicked in, and their once breathtaking curves reverted inward at a rapid clip to the blackest matter known across space. "I felt it when she died," Shiro husked.The cockpit grew blurry through Keith's frustrated, swiftly gathering tears. At a loss, he leant forward and took great care in thumbing the blood from Shiro's bottom lip."As many times as it takes,"Keith promised, sick with what it'd always meant. "If I could go back. Shiro, if I could—" Devotion, he'd learned long ago, was both the hardest and the easiest thing to break. "I wouldn't have said it to anyone,no onebut you."





	1. (prologue)

_Now—_

Soft was not the way of universes. Yet, from where Keith sat in the cockpit of a Galra fighter, fingers creaking with how hard he held onto the controls, the swath of space that poured across his view window seconds after his hasty take-off from Senfama could not have been more so. Perhaps it was a consequence of the seize in his frantic, drumming heart, a lack of airflow to the brain that spilt single-minded desperation in its wake.

Outside, the hazy, gaseous light of solar dust flickered by, and outwardly, Keith maintained an air of collected calm as his ship raced toward the other rebel fighters.

“Shiro—can you hear me? Shiro!”

The murmuring static of a dead comm line filled the space around him, and Keith felt smaller, in that moment, than he ever had before. Rebel ships came to flank him on either side; distantly, he heard himself say something about attacking the fleet head-on.

His window exploded into frenetic bursts of color, after that, whiplash that whited out his view window and felt empty, dislocated from his sense of reality, without the accompanying noise of fire in the sucking vacuum of space.

_Disrupt the fleet, save Voltron._

It was a rapid mantra in his head as he maneuvered through debris and lead the rebels onward. But something was wrong, the fleet’s main cruiser, it—

“We’ll never penetrate those shields!” Matt called out, the words a rising pitch over the ringing in Keith’s ears.

Hidden, comfortable and safe, beneath the lower fold of his suit’s belt pouch, the compressed pokéball he’d carried for so long—learned, by cool touch alone—became a leaden point of pressure against his hip. Keith did not remove a hand from the controls to brush his fingers down against it, even as he ached to. Instead, he thrust his course ahead, and said, “Maybe not with our weapons.”

Purple light reflected off the cruiser’s shield, leaving blotted imprints on the backs of Keith’s eyelids which bled out over his vision and made it swim. A burst of taste popped between his teeth as he swallowed, sharp like salt and brine, copious spit having pooled beneath his tongue, and he remembered in those flashes the sensation of being swept underwater in a vicious, grasping undertow. Purple became blue in his mind, striated with the sinking sunlight of a sun he hardly recognized through the crashing waves.

It was a memory long forgotten. Keith only knew that he was a child then, and how frightened he’d been, how his throat had burned as the oxygen decomposed inside his lungs. Keith wasn’t frightened now. He’d never been surer of his place, his  _duty_ in all this—the one thing he’d always had left to offer.

Carefully, he did not think of Shiro, or the team. They had their leader again.

 _Knowledge or death._ This universe could not afford to be soft. Neither, still, could Keith.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and let the weight of the pokéball ground him for a moment more.  _Forgive me_ , he wished he could have told it.

“What are you doing—Keith, no!”


	2. a safe place to land

_Eight months before Kerberos launch—_

There were often days in Keith’s life where he woke to the feeling of a distinct pocket of restless _something_ bubbling upward the nape of his neck and into his skull, where every minute after was accompanied by active discomfort, the throbbing heat of an undirected, purposeless anger sliding around his head like condensed pancake batter down a tilted, grit-covered pan. Far less common were the days where he didn’t look for a reason to relieve the unforgiving pressure which built and built, whether that be through his voice, shouting until his teeth ached and his throat hurt to breathe, or through his fists, pounding his knuckles raw against unfortunate backyard trees. Maybe it started after Keith’s mom left, or maybe it started years later, after he left his dad; those last months spent in a youth shelter before his sixteenth birthday hit and his application to the Galaxy Garrison went through.

When the acceptance letter finally came, the following morning found Keith boarding the next shuttle out of the city with nothing but the clothes on his back and his two few belongings: a uniquely-marked knife—untraceable, as much as he’d searched—that was all he had to remember his mom, and the pokéball cinched to his belt. Keith hadn’t known what to do with the first when his dad gave it to him, hadn’t even _wanted_ the latter. And as the shuttle jostled, so too had the ball against his ribs, imaginary burn marks forming with every impact.

In the cities, it was rare to see people without their pokémon at their side. Outbound shuttles were not as crowded as those coming in, yet were full enough to drive Keith to distraction. On the seat across from him, a little girl bounced a sentret on her knees, filling their shared space with intermittent giggles, while the middle-aged man beside Keith fed bits of his lunch to the ledyba perched atop his shoulder, the excited susurration of its hidden hindwings stirring the hair at Keith’s cheek. Keith could only clench his teeth and pretend he didn’t mind.

Partner bonding was encouraged in the states as early as middle school, some places even earlier, though many did not find the right pokémon for them until they were significantly older. After all, it’s as they say: _you don’t choose your partner, your partner chooses you._ A partner centered you when you couldn’t help yourself, provided support when times were rough. Keith could hardly recall his mom’s face, much less the face of her partner. His earliest memories consisted of crushed beer cans in an overfilled kitchen garbage bin and dirty dishes piled to the sink’s rim, the smell of sweat and dead fish that stuck to his dad like a second shadow, always coming home late—if he came home at all—and the dark shape of his dad’s nidorino passed out in the cramped downstairs hall, covered in bruises and cuts from too many illegal fights the weeks that money was tight. 

When Keith was nine years old, his dad’s third DUI earned him a sizeable stint in jail. With no other family to speak of, CPS took it upon themselves to shove Keith into foster care, and when he proved difficult, _uncommunicative_ , at home and in school, Keith’s foster parents sent him to therapy. They seemed to have gotten it in their heads that Keith was a special case. The kind that warranted speeding up the process of finding a partner pokémon so as to improve his _emotional_ _health_. For two days a week for seven months, Keith sat with a growlithe for the better part of an hour and, when asked, talked about his newest school-related troubles; fights he’d allowed other boys to start, and ones he’d instigated, too. Always in the defense of others, never for himself. The growlithe was trained for service and never barked or growled, instead nosing at Keith’s hands whenever the words ground to a halt in his shrinking throat, and that restless indiscriminate anger brought him close to shaking apart.

Keith stopped going to therapy when his dad came back for him.

Thinking about that time now, he decided—his dad should never have even bothered.

Orientation at the Garrison was a lackluster affair. Keith rode a connecting shuttle from the nearest town that dropped him off at the administration offices, where he checked in and received multiple sets of his cadet uniform, a badge, identification card, and a standard-issue touchpad. He had a bunk assignment, and class placement would be at zero-nine-hundred. With time still to spare before then, Keith wandered down a less populated hallway and hoped he’d eventually find the dormitories.

One stretch of hall he passed through was lit only by the faded sunlight the poured in from the floor-to-ceiling window. It looked out over one of the training fields, where even now, a group of older cadets were running their first drills of the day. Along the horizon a sliver of sun peaked above the red hills. Keith looked away a moment later, taking note of the neat rows of pictures that filled the opposite wall. They were portraits for the most part: decorated flight officers dressed in immaculate uniform, their pokémon sitting at attention beside them.

Keith’s hands curled into tight fists, and he swallowed his doubt before it could fully form inside his chest. It was a requirement upon admission at the Garrison to enlist alongside a partner. Those that didn’t would be assigned one their first day of training. Keith hadn’t given himself a choice in the matter—not when technically, he’d had a partner all along.

 _You’re so close_ , Keith told himself fiercely, forcing his fingers to flex and relax, _don’t let this be the thing that stops you._

He wished, more than anything, that he could trust that to be true.

Keith’s dormitory was little bigger than the room he’d occupied at the youth shelter, but that suited him just fine. There were two beds, two cubby-sized desks, and an attached bathroom—all decidedly spartan, economical, and just as he’d imagined. It appeared his roommate had already dropped off their things, anyway; a large duffle sat on one of the desks, and there were already sheets fitted on the adjacent bed. All Keith could think to do was stuff his knife under his own pillow and drop his armful of things on the mattress. If he was lucky, his roommate would be the type to keep to themselves rather than look to be his friend. Keith shook his head at the notion, a brief tightening in his jaw, and quietly convinced himself he wasn’t here to make friends. He was here for—something he’d never dared dream that he could have.

For once, his fantasies of freedom wouldn’t be limited to astrology books from the local library and stolen moments on an aged hoverbike belonging to one of the neighborhood kids. He was finally going to make it to the stars, the one place where the expectations of earth could not reach him, and he’d do whatever it took to get there.

He debated, briefly, unclipping the pokéball from his belt and shoving it out of sight the same as he had his knife. But when he rolled it in his palm, and the distilled fluorescents of the room danced across its curved metal surface, a familiar pall of guilt formed around his heart, thickening with scar tissue that no amount of years would ever heal. The feeling of it reminded Keith of all the mornings before school that he woke at dawn to make breakfast for him and his dad, only for one plate to go cold, untouched; every Mother’s Day that he spent camped out on the outskirts of the city airstrip to watch the planes take off into the night; and the many times he’d snuck out of his foster parents’ tidy suburban home to nurse black eyes before they could see his ruined face.

It was not a nice feeling, or one fit to last. Still, Keith clipped the pokéball to his belt again without a second thought.

Once he’d changed into his uniform, Keith decided to leave early for class placement just so he’d have extra time to find where the simulation tests would be held. He passed several other cadets along the way, most of them either discussing previous scores or divulging their half-baked hopes of receiving a fighter class assignment. It wasn’t until Keith reached the main training hall, though, that he realized just how many other students would be in his year. A considerable crowd of cadets had gathered around their placement instructor— _Iverson_ , Keith would soon learn—as they waited for testing to begin.

The tests weren’t simple runs of flight skill, but also dexterity and aptitude, critical-thinking and focus. Iverson called up cadets alphabetically by last name, which meant Keith did not get his turn until an hour into the proceedings. Until that time, however, he hung back from the crowd and leant against the wall directly beneath the hall’s observation deck, where the shadow of the overhang kept him mostly out of sight, or at least, made him less noticeable than the chattier kids milling about. Despite the self-imposed distance, their charged gossip and nervous murmurings reached him all the same.

Keith affected boredom as he waited, but in reality, his gut fluttered with the piteous beginnings of anxiety. He had nothing to worry about as long as he didn’t completely flub the simulation. Keith didn’t care about the distinction between the classes. He just cared about getting in a cockpit. It was all the same to him, so why did it seem to matter to everyone else? They were all here to fly, weren’t they? The way Keith best understood things was in black and white— _you either make it, or you don’t._ The root of his concern wasn’t dependent on what others thought of him, and neither did he care about any perceived notion of his skill behind the controls. It was the simple act of _being here_ , his ability to do the very thing no one once told him that he could.

By the time Keith’s turn came, he’d squashed the lingering dregs of his nerves and came forward with a decided jut to his clenched jaw. And as he entered into the sim pod and took his seat at the helm, he reminded himself that he’d woken up angry this morning—that low throb of heat and compact energy was abuzz at the base of his skull, and he embraced it, allowed it to pool at his fingertips and wash away his worry. Keith Kogane was a pilot. All he had to do was prove it.

Afterwards, Keith wouldn’t be able to quite recall the exact details of the simulation, even so much as seconds after, when the timer hit zero and he emerged from the pod to Iverson’s baffled face. The navigation hadn’t been complicated, but there were distinct intervals where the terrain and flight conditions called for quick calculation and quicker maneuvering. The task was something of a red herring and had to do with the transport of a civilian between two airspaces of variable climate. There were moments where his diagnostic readings had jumped and blared, and Keith saw red with how hard his heart had thumped. Somewhere in the middle of things, he’d very nearly come close to clipping a wing on an abrupt rock formation. But maybe that was a part of the test; its sudden appearance from the dense fog, and his ingenuity with the subsequent drop and roll needed to curve around it. A lesser pilot would have taken the more obvious way and flown _up_.

Or so Keith had thought.

By the look of Iverson’s raised eyebrows and the downward quirk of his stern mouth, Keith was guessing not.

_Damn it._

Walking away, Keith kept his eyes on the ground and tamped down the burst of emotion that fought to rise to the surface. The other cadets were not privy to the individual simulations, but officers on the observation deck were. He could have sworn he felt the weight of their attention, like a burning sensation on the back of his neck, beneath his hair, as he left the hall in a hurry.

He didn’t get far. Another great hall sat across from the one where the simulations were held, more like a gym than anything else, despite there being an actual gym in one of the neighboring buildings. The cadets that had finished their simulation test had moved on to the second part of placement: that was, combat. Really, Keith should have _known_. Should have expected it, even. That placement fell not just on the cadet, but their partner, too.

The combat hall was a high-ceilinged monstrosity of bright stage lights and an open floorplan devoted to attack dummies, an obstacle course, and a series of boxes drawn into the fake turf with chalk. At the entrance, another instructor wearing the grey uniform of a flight officer directed cadets to sit down in a row of bleachers. Keith had little choice but to comply.

Already, two cadets stood opposing each other in the chalk boxes. The lankier of the two cocked his hip out and crossed his arms, jeering noisily, “That all you got, huh?”

His pokémon, an eevee, crouched panting a handful of paces in front of him. Its small body was otherwise undamaged compared to the other cadet’s partner, a scuffed and battered phanpy that even now, was pawing at the turf as it flared its ears out, trembling with the very effort of remaining standing. The other cadet was a broad-shouldered boy with a non-uniform headband tied in his shaggy hair. In Keith’s estimation, he looked to be ten seconds away from crying.

“Let’s finish this,” the first cadet said with a smirk. He pointed a finger at the phanpy. “Eevee, tackle!”

A cadet seated below Keith scoffed beneath her breath, mumbling something derisive to her seatmate along the lines of _is that the only move it knows?_

The eevee swallowed a big breath, wobbling slightly before it launched into a sprint. Its ears pressed back against its head, which to Keith, was as sure a sign as any of its reticence to continue the fight. He’d been around enough underground circles when his dad still participated in them—those that were purely physical fights, no special moves allowed—to know what a pokémon looked like when pushed to the edge. Nowadays, pokémon were rarely used in battles, and in many parts of the world, including the states, battles were illegal outside of the military and regulated competitions. If he had to guess, this cadet was consistently using physical attacks without breaks or changing tactics to stats.

The second cadet, the one with the headband, chose that moment to panic. “Defense curl!” he blurted.

Before eevee could make contact, a mirroring panic took hold of phanpy, and it promptly rolled face-first into the turf, a move lacking in finesse but with the desired effect of somersaulting into a tight ball. The tough plates on phanpy’s back then took the full brunt of eevee’s attack.  

“Oh, what? Come _on!_ ” complained the first cadet. “Tackle it again!”

“That will be enough, McClain.” Nearby, an instructor looked on with a disappointed shake to her head. She marked something on her touchpad with a flick of her finger. “Next two cadets, on the field.”

One by one, the cadets seated below Keith took their turn, sending out their partners to demonstrate several moves and attacks on their temporary opponent. None of them got quite so far as the cadet with the eevee had, or went about as viciously. Keith’s hand went to his own pokéball at his hip, and his brow pulled forward with the weight of his concern, his trepidation at what this could mean for him. And if he had unknowingly failed the simulation, what then? Why embarrass himself when this was already over and done for?

He didn’t know whose rejection he feared more—the Garrison’s, or his so-called _partner’s._

“Cadet Kogane?” called the same instructor as earlier. She was a short woman with light brown hair and a face far less stern than Iverson’s; kind, even. He could have sworn she’d introduced herself as Professor Montgomery, but with the way his concentration had been going in and out all morning, he couldn’t say for certain.

And going by the inflection of her voice, this was not the first time she’d called on him.

Abruptly, Keith stood from his seat and grit his teeth. He knew the cadets still seated around him were staring up at him with an odd mixture of confusion and interest. Classes were not yet in session and one of the newest cadets was already prepared to walk away, was what they were surely thinking.

“I can’t,” he muttered. “I— _”_

“Step down and send out your partner,” Professor Montgomery prompted, tone brokering no argument.

Keith glanced up to meet her steady gaze and shifted his chin. “My partner is not fit to participate at this time,” then almost an afterthought, he finished, “ma’am.”

Montgomery looked unimpressed with this answer, but she didn’t attempt to push further. Without looking, she made a notation on her touchpad. “Your request for exemption from this test automatically places you in Basic. Dismissed, cadet.”

Keith didn’t need to be told twice. Though it was not until he’d put a significant distance between himself and the combat hall that he allowed his fists to loosen, as much as he wished it hadn’t turned out like this, he knew he wouldn’t be able to get the sound of the other cadets’ contemptuous whispers out of his head for a while to come. _I don’t care what anyone thinks,_ he told himself fiercely as he made the walk back to the dorms. The pokéball rocked minutely with his steps. For the barest fraction of a second, he’d almost had himself convinced.


	3. growing pains

When Keith was a child, a teacher that caught him sitting alone during recess, scowling at his knees, told him that there were rarely exact moments in life when things began, but rather they were a culmination of events, of feelings that knocked together like dominos in their neat, predictable rows. On the walk home from school that day, Keith overheard one of the fourteen-year-old punks that hung around the boarded-up gas station behind the neighborhood complain about a dent in his hoverboard. The older kids were too preoccupied with shaking spray cans and slashing the walls with haphazard graffiti to spot Keith when he passed by on his own. But he’d gotten the gist of their blistering talk, and in the end, he was a wary seven-year-old with a new word, poised to cut, on the tip of his tongue. He mulled over what the teacher had said again and thought it apt.

_Bullshit._

There were a number of moments in Keith’s life that he could pinpoint simply for being out of his control; moments that were little more than wretched, and moments that were uncomfortably unfair. You don’t lose the things that matter without coming to know that loss as intimately as you know yourself. For someone like Keith, who struggled to align his sense of heritage with memories of parents who might or might not have cared, the image he saw of himself was fractured more than most.

The first time that Keith ran away from the house he’d been born into was just that: anything but the last. He was thirteen when he set up a more permanent campsite in the strip of forest bordering the nearby military outlet. Thirteen when he learned how to survive off the land and skin a rabbit, collect rainfall in self-made waterskins, and sew; all while regretful, truly, that he’d stolen the necessary books from the library, and hopeful of one day seeing them returned. He never tired of the empty hours spent in the company of only constant quiet, save, of course, for the intermittent thrum and rattle of distant airship engines which heralded their arrival and eventual departure somewhere above the trees. But then a full year later, Keith awoke empty-headed one morning instead of angry, a first in many months, and perhaps stupidly... he went home; or what was as much his home as he’d ever allowed a place to become.

The moment Keith slipped back into his dad’s house through the upstairs bedroom window—the lock on the shutters just as broken as the day he’d gone—that was the one Keith remembered most, its details sharper than the point of a pin, and more ingrained in his mind than the shape of a knife he knew better than he did his own.

Keith found his dad in the living room, at the bookcase sorting through reams of outdated datalogs that Keith had always believed to be nothing but numbers and gibberish. Keith could have turned and run, but he didn’t. Instead, he cleared his throat and waited for his dad to acknowledge him, uncertain and stubbornly silent, stood silhouetted in the darkness of the kitchen doorway. Because the thing was this: Keith hadn’t cut his mop of hair since the day he ran out the door, hadn’t bathed in half that time, and though he didn’t realize it yet, he wore just shy of three new inches to his awkward, gangly height. All that and still, Keith didn’t have to breathe a word for his dad to know it was him.

“Keith,” his dad said in that way of his that never failed to make Keith want to stay. The fingers of his dad’s free hand slid over the cracked cds that lined the middle shelf like a probing touch over broken ribs. He laid his stack of papers on the overlarge machine at his feet, one of the many unworkable long-distance radios his dad always promised he’d someday fix. There were a lot of things his dad promised Keith, but fixing things—Keith couldn’t recall how young he’d been when he outgrew such pleasant, naïve dreams as that. “You kept me up waiting.”

“Yeah, well.” Keith shrugged, at a loss for what he could possibly do or say. His legs felt weak, but paradoxically, might as well have been carved from stone for all that they would not budge. Higher up, his chest ached something awful. The air in the living room smelt of dust and stale liquor, and an amber tint colored the world, born of the afternoon sunlight that filtered through the slitted blinds.

What Keith wanted to say was _I’m here._ He hadn’t woken up angry today. He’d just woken up lost. And he hated, really, how that made him feel like a dog, twice kicked but still loyal to an instrumental fault.

“While you were gone,” his dad started, and stopped a moment, as he picked his words with uncharacteristic care. “While you were gone, I promised myself that I’d give you what was owed to you if you ever allowed yourself to come back.”

Keith pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth and counted backward from five. “Owed to me,” he said.

“Her knife wasn’t the only thing she left you, son.” Fine words, to be sure, but they were lost to Keith seconds after he’d latched onto a select few. _She left you_.

His dad whistled, low. A pause followed, then a familiar, heavy head nudged behind Keith’s knees. It was hard to believe that there was a time where Keith had been not much taller than the most well-defined of nidorino’s spines. Those spines that were covered now in more scars than Keith remembered mapping as a toddler were also more notched, discolored, and with time had wilted back. Nidorino had always been an imposing force of nature, but to Keith at least, he had noticeably remained gentle. That gentleness, too, was a familiar sight as nidorino pushed his snout against Keith’s limp hand.

“I was going through some of her old things several weeks ago,” Keith’s dad continued, an audible waver in his voice as a small object was dropped from nidorino’s mouth into Keith’s upturned palm. “Nidorino isn’t one to let my mistakes rest.” It was a pokéball, Keith knew immediately, and couldn’t stop the stutter that wrecked his breath. His dad, haggard, prolonged a sigh. “It’s yours. _He’s_ yours. Your mother wanted you to have—”

“No,” Keith interrupted. “You never—” a thick swallow, contraction in his lungs, “How long?”

_How long has it been since the day you were born?_

_How long has it been since she left? One day there, and the next one gone?_

Fourteen years was no time at all to Keith, not once he’d grown accustomed to being alone. But there was a marked lack of choice in that which he understood more than anyone else, the difference between leaving and becoming the person who was left behind, _choosing_ circumstance rather than having circumstance thrust upon you.

Keith had a _partner._

Of course, it made a sort of cosmic sense that his partner would come to hate Keith for leaving the same way that everyone else eventually left Keith.

After that day, Keith found it hard to pretend he wasn’t angry. He tried, though—and wasn’t that the sentiment that count?

 _Bullshit._ Right?

The first night that Keith spent as a cadet at the Galaxy Garrison saw him laid out on his belly in bed, tipping his knife over in the thin glow of the outside hallway’s dim security lights which managed to leak around the door. He’d been careful to wrap the hilt and hide away its foreign mark, but he’d have to be even more careful to keep it concealed while he was here. His roommate—some kid whose name he’d already forgotten—was the stick-in-the-mud type who seemed keen on spending all hours of the day at the library studying and in the dorm only to sleep after mandatory curfew.

Neither the kid nor her partner pinged Keith’s distrust, but what he’d gleaned from her kecleon when they’d made their introductions earlier in the day was that her partner had a curious streak a mile wide. Pokémon were allowed out of their balls in the dorms without restriction, and maybe it made Keith an asshole, but he’d been crystal clear concerning his shit: she and her kecleon stay on their side of the room, and Keith would keep to his. The harsh bite with which Keith had told her this had been a product of his frustration with the placement tests. Effective, in any case. She’d stared at him with wide eyes when he stomped inside the room and said his piece with the figurative blow of a lash, then she’d nodded, quick enough to appease the ugly mess of emotions that had weighed on Keith since he’d stormed out of the gym.

When awake, her kecleon cocked its head too often for Keith’s comfort. It also liked to flick its tongue at any object that happened to catch its interest. But fortunately for his peace of mind, it only acted on the impulse to rifle and touch if its human partner permitted. Still, Keith contemplated the risk as he marveled at the intricate bend and slope of his knife’s blade edge in the cloak of dark, noting the blue cast to the metal that flickered even beneath meager lines of sterile white light. His roommate hadn’t offered a nickname for her kecleon, despite Keith learning during his short time in therapy that pronouns, at the very least, were polite. Whatever. He didn’t trust that kecleon’s beady, dead-eyed stare as far as he could throw it.

Dawn came and went, though Keith couldn’t relax enough in his new surroundings to chance sleep. By the time the designated meal hour rolled around, he redressed in his uniform and stowed his knife beneath two pillows for good measure, ready to head out to the cafeteria not long after his roommate and her kecleon had already gone. Keith tucked his pokéball under the baggy fold of his uniform, steeled himself for the potential fallout, then followed.

At a push, Keith would be the first to admit, albeit irritated, that _yes_ —he did have _somewhat_ of a latent tendency to miss the obvious. Which is more than partly the reason behind his bewilderment when he was met with an excited jumble of cadets around the corner from the commissary. He was exhausted, unreasonably morose over his performance in the sim pod yesterday, and upon this newest development, could already feel his face beginning to twitch with annoyance. _So what, exactly_ , grumbled the tired slush of his thoughts, _am I missing now?_

As it turned out: everything.

“Cargo pilot!” an obnoxious cadet screeched at the front of the herd. Those gathered around the screens on the wall were gliding their fingers down the listed names in search of their own. Unsurprising to Keith, the cadet that was cawing like a pissy crow was the same one who had severely overdone his combat test the day before. His eevee was draped over his shoulder, deceit plain in its lazy sprawl and bored, hooded eyes; look past the cadet’s distracting tantrum though, and eevee was vehemently stroking its bushy tail along his neck in the off-chance the motion calmed him down. “Combat Class D, too? That’s one step up from _Basic!”_

It was a struggle to push against the crowd, but Keith managed to get close enough to hastily skim the assignments. A headache pressed against his temples, desperate enough to dig its claws in deep, and Keith had the feeling that this was another of those moments he’d either remember for what it began or forever regret for what it didn’t.

Lost to this fugue state for an overlong moment, Keith startled halfway out of his boots when a chatot trilled by his ear. He bumped into the cadet behind him and made a clipped apology—that was, to a taller boy with almond hair and glasses perched on the end of his nose, similarly lost to concentrating on the screen before Keith unbalanced him. The boy’s mouth bloomed into a bright smile, and he offered a sweet, unbothered laugh. “Hey, it’s no problem,” he assured Keith.

The chatot paused in its preening of the boy’s hair to echo his laughter, merrily singing, “One step up from _Basic! Basic! Basic!”_

Cadet McClain crossed his arms in a huff and sent all three of them a sniffy, haughty glare. “Yeah, yeah. _Laugh it up,_ wise guys. They said at placement that cadets move up all the time!” Rather than leaving it at that, his eyes then slid to Keith, recognition making his expression briefly slack. “Oh, but wait. You’re too good to show us your partner. Too good you think you’ll test out?”

Keith suppressed his instinctive defensiveness and glanced away, agitated by the attention of the cadets that had circled around them and even more irked with himself, how quick his spine stiffened at the blatant provocation. His gaze landed on the screen again, and he sucked in a breath of air jagged enough to wound.

“So?” McClain prodded, his eevee flicking its tail out like a proud, lavish cat, “Montgomery pushed you through to Basic. That’s bottom rung, Kogane.”

The floor could have given out beneath Keith’s feet and he would not have even noticed. He exhaled, shaky, and let all pretense of his most well-worn worries melt away after so many years of bearing their crippling weight. He smirked, knowing it’d be the thing his small audience would see, and not the stark paleness of his stunned face. “Actually,” he replied, the words distant to him, as though he weren’t the one speaking them. “I’m fighter class.”

McClain’s gaping disbelief was worth any grief Keith soldiered leading up to it. Once McClain regained control of his mouth, however, he closed it with a displeased hum, reached a hand up to scritch at his eevee’s groomed flank, and walked away, no worse for wear than he’d arrived.

The rest of the cadets dispersed; no doubt they were hungry for breakfast. Meanwhile Keith had returned his focus to the amalgamation of blue pixels that formed his last name on the assignment list, set aside his designation number, and aside that—

_Class: Fighter ... Combat: Basic_

He didn’t think it was real.

An elbow hit him square between the shoulderblades and knocked him forward a step, but the intent of it wasn’t mean, or really forceful in the least. Keith hesitated to call it teasing, but, well.

“Nice going, star boy,” congratulated the tall boy with the chatot. His beaming smile was almost infectious. Almost. “I’m Matt, by the way. You?”

The physical blow to Keith’s back immediately had his hackles raised. That didn’t last long, though, when his mind made the association between the touch and Matt’s kind eyes and kinder praise. Keith had to turn away from the abject openness on Matt’s face, aware that he was drawing inward and unwilling to stop. _This isn’t what you came here for,_ Keith reminded himself. _You know this never lasts._

“Is Kogane your first _and_ last name?” Matt continued, undeterred. The way he emphasized as he spoke led Keith to believe that Matt was being playful. It might have, generously, been called a poor man’s attempt at wheedling. Whenever Matt opened his mouth, his chatot had a strange habit of cooing softly to fill the gaps between his words. It made it seem easy, too easy, for Keith to give in to his long-buried urge to trust.

“Sorry,” Keith said, hands fast to form their fighting fists, predictable as ever. “I—sorry.” He pushed past Matt, their shoulders inadvertently knocking together, causing Matt’s chatot to squawk, and Keith knew—he _knew_ things would be different if he just—

He was _fighter class._ He’d made it so far.

Keith was not about to ruin this, and he certainly would not look back.


	4. fated to crash

The following evening found Keith in the back room of the Garrison’s gym facilities, landing rapid, successive blows to one of several lightweight punching bags that hung from the ceiling above a non-slip mat. He had a full day of classes behind him, the official beginning to his freshman year in the program, but before the second hour was up that morning, his pulse had already jumped to his hands, pace steadily climbing until cramps had set in. Call it an _itch_ —Keith went through most of the day dying to do something with his fists that wasn’t scribbling lecture notes or writing out equations with chalk.

_"Welcome to the first day of fighter class, cadets.” Iverson struck a proud figure as he walked down the line of cadets at the front of the classroom, his arms folded at his back. “As the best and brightest of your year, you lot currently stand here on the basis of commendable academic achievement and your scores on the placement test held yesterday."_

Keith dug his feet into the mat, impossibly deep, and lead with his knuckles into the next punch.

_The room was large and spacious enough to account for the sim pods and an immense vidscreen built to be visible from the observation deck. Iverson spared nothing in his outline of the program’s expectations, emphasizing the importance of analysis and application. Once he’d exhausted all of his points, he procured a remote and powered on the vidscreen._

_"As you may recall,” said Iverson, the screen going dark for a moment, before filling with the distinctive terrain of the placement simulation. Specifically, it was the sequence toward the end, when the fog had grown thickest and a dangerous surge of turbulence set off almost every alarm. The screen flashed with red light. “This was but one of multiple checkpoints spread throughout the simulation."_

_Belatedly, Keith noticed his own last name blinking in the bottom corner of the recording, right next to the counter for time elapsed._

On his next punch, the bones in Keith’s hand gave a tremulous twinge. He paused there, and sucked in a gulp of the icy air that was pouring into the room from a nearby vent. Fortunately, he’d had the forethought to tie his hair in a loose ponytail, though he wished he had an armband to wipe at the sweat that beaded along his temples and down his nose. Not so fortunate, his gloves were worn from years of use, and didn’t provide much cushion despite the underlying tape that he’d wrapped his knuckles with before he began.

He shook out one hand and switched to the other.

_"Only one other cadet in the history of the program carried out this exact maneuver to pass the checkpoint.”_

_The maneuver in question was the drop and roll Keith performed in the heat of the moment, narrowly missing the rock formation that came at him, deadcenter, from out of nowhere._

_“I'm certain many of you are already aware who Takashi Shirogane is," Iverson continued. He had a look in his eyes, impassive but arguably admiring, that added a meaningful gravitas to his words. The name didn’t jog any recent part of Keith’s memory. “Now, can anyone tell me what you are seeing?”_

Within a minute later, the rope that the punching bag hung from broke loose from the force of Keith’s next well-aimed hit. The bag plummeted to the mat with a muted thump and skidded several feet.

_No one out of the handful of cadets in the room spoke up. Because none of them were Keith. None of them made the same call, and no doubt it ate at them in ways they couldn’t explain. Keith, for his part, would have given anything to have been made invisible._

_“Wind shear,” Iverson supplied, finally. “Your most basic piloting knowledge would dictate flying over storms to be preferential to flying under, and that compounded with an obstacle would naturally place your focus on ascent. But in this scenario, you are dealing with a rapid change from an updraft into a downdraft. By overcompensating to push against it, you risk loss of control, whereas following it downward takes half the time, with more to spare before any potential crash and a greater window for evasive action.”_

Keith wiped at his mouth, fingers trembling from exertion. Punching things was always the quickest way to clear his head. Or at least, wearing out his brain to the point that he could no longer process the tiresome stream of his thoughts. The itch was gone, for which he was glad. What remained was his exhaustion, and a cautious optimism he hated himself for allowing to form so soon and so fast.

_"Cadet Kogane, you're off to a promising start."_

But Keith was here, wasn’t he? Even after everything that had happened to him in the past. That’s what was so frustrating—he couldn’t name the thing that was bothering him. He wondered, though, if it wasn’t all that complicated. First with Matt, and then today, with Iverson, he couldn’t shake the feeling that their praise had been undeserved, empty.

 _You’re overthinking this_ , Keith admonished, as he bent forward to right the punching bag and grab ahold of the rope. _Stop that._

Mandatory curfew was less than an hour off. Most of those who weren’t in their dorms by now were likely on their way back, which meant the gym had cleared out in the last thirty or so minutes. Keith appreciated the time to himself; he didn’t even have that in the bunk where he slept. And with the gym so quiet and big, the hum of the air vent a welcome lull once his panting slowed, Keith was doing a swell job of leveling his head.

It probably was not the best idea, however, to assume that he was alone.

Another set of feet padded onto the mat behind him. He snapped upward from his crouch as soon as their soft thwaps registered. Which was the worst thing he could have done, really, because then the top of Keith’s head was colliding with someone else’s chin—that _hurt_ —and whoever the hell had snuck up on him choked on a pained grunt.

This marked the second time this had happened in as many days. Was it really that difficult for people to give him his space?

Keith straightened out his knees and whirled around, a dozen biting curses ready to spring from his mouth, but his tongue twisted itself into a knot before he could so much as say a thing.

“Ow,” said the guy Keith had knocked down. He was dressed in joggers and a black tank run through with sweat. Rubbing now at his prominent jaw, he sat back on his heels in the spot where he'd crumpled to the mat. “My bad. I’ll take the fall for that one.” His eyes grew large, and he coughed, lips doing something odd in an attempt to smother a laugh. “Um. I mean, not literally.”

The guy’s hair was darker than Keith’s. A longer flock of it at the front fell across his forehead, though the sides were buzzed short. It... suited him. And because this was what was going through Keith’s head and not anything logical like an apology, the guy ended up waiting for a response for an unreasonable length of time.

Keith cleared his throat and offered him a hand up. “You surprised me, that's all,” he admitted, genuine. “Figured I was the last one here.”

He didn't know who he'd expected to see, but it certainly wasn't someone who was several years older than him. Were senior cadets exempt from curfew?

“Don't worry about it.” The guy quirked a warm smile and raised one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. He took a step back once he was on his feet again, passing a hand over the nape of his neck. For whatever reason, his eyes tracked down Keith’s chest—until, that was, Keith realized what he was looking at: the _KOGANE, K._ stitched into a patch on the front of Keith’s Garrison-issued workout jacket. “Wait,” the guy said, drawn out, confused. “ _You're_ Kogane?" He glanced between Keith and the fallen punching bag. When their gazes locked again, his eyebrows had nearly hit his hairline. "Aren't you in Danovich's combat class?"

By now, the sweat that had gathered at the small of Keith’s back had grown cold, though its chill was slow to work its way up his spine. He could imagine the sight he made: nostrils widening and lips becoming pinched, the taste of his own spit souring. Keith remembered how the cadet from yesterday sneered at him for opting out of the combat test, and despite himself, he wanted nothing more than to walk away. Why did everyone seem to be so concerned with _his_ placement scores— _they didn’t even know him._

His combat class wouldn’t be starting until next week, a point of contention for Keith that he’d tried his damnedest to put out of his mind until that time arrived. Combat training _did_ require he bring along his partner. He couldn’t opt out again, and he hated how that made him feel helpless.

 _My partner won’t listen to me,_ he imagined himself announcing to the entire class. _If I send him out, I can’t promise that he won’t hurt you._

Yeah, because that would go over _so well._

“I am,” was all Keith said in reply, his tone short. He turned around and grabbed onto the punching bag so he could return it to the hook, be done with this, and leave. But to his annoyance, the older cadet was persistent. He helped Keith haul the bag over, then held it while Keith redid the rope tie.

“I only meant...” It sounded like this guy was, well, not crestfallen, exactly, but flustered and thrown by Keith’s swift dismissal. “Sorry, I just thought that you might—”

“It’s fine,” Keith told him, softening after a touch. It was late, and try as he might, the day had wrung him too thoroughly for him to stay upset for long. He peeled off his gloves without another word and pocketed them on his way out of the room. When no response followed, Keith stopped at the door.

The other stood squinting at the punching bag, appearing, for all the world, as though he were trying to make sense of something important.

“Goodnight?” Keith hesitated to offer.

“Oh,” the guy breathed out, and glanced over at Keith, a myriad of conflicting emotions at war upon his face, drawing his brow inward and his dark lashes down to flick over his cheeks. “Sorry, again. Have a good night.”

It did not occur to Keith until much, much later, lying on his back in bed with one hand shoved partway under his pillow to rest against his knife, that he’d never seen the guy before, and yet somehow he knew what combat class Keith had placed in. That was, perhaps, the strangest thing of all.

As it turned out though—not even close.

Friday rolled around in what felt like no time at all, and from what Keith could tell, half of the cadets were excited to catch a shuttle into town over the forthcoming weekend, while the other half lamented the endless hours of studying that yawned and stretched before them. Keith welcomed the shift in the Garrison’s atmosphere when the loudest and most rambunctious of his peers were gone come Saturday morning. He finally found the time to wander more of the grounds, the added bonus being that he was less likely to deal with anyone intruding.

The halls of the science and research departments were unfamiliar territory, but after a while, he was rewarded for his efforts with the discovery of what he believed to be a planetarium. The researchers here were the ones who perfected the flight program’s simulations to begin with; it made sense that they would continue to tweak the technology as time went on. But there was a difference, in Keith’s opinion, between the average planetarium and sitting out beneath the actual stars at night; the tangibility of that which no one could entirely duplicate.

This planetarium was not a monstrous dome, but merely a tiny room wider than it was tall. The low ceiling was made from a synthetic glass through which the desert sky could be seen overhead, feeling closer, more in reach, than Keith could ever recall. The room contained nothing aside from an elevated, circular plot of grass and planted flowers at its center, a bench built into its stone foundation that formed a full circuit around it.

Keith had an inkling of what this was all about, and so he returned to this room later the same night. With the stars out, the universe felt at once as though it were both meeting him for the first time face to face, and lying dormant an incredible distance away. Struck dumb, his very breath stolen in his awe, Keith sat on the bench and stared up at the sky, watching the turn of the display that was built into the glass; how it sent complex explosions of color like erupted nebulae across the view of far-off space, and how it lit glowing lines, one after the other, between the stars of constellations, until at last they faded once more into nothing.

After a while, his body grew sore from his reclined position, and he flipped around to crawl up onto the grass. Movement caught his attention in the corner of his eye once he’d flopped over and kicked his legs out. In a clump of the evening primroses and moonflowers—their delicate buds in various stages of bloom now that night had fallen—a pokémon stirred and waked. It was a whimsicott, its snout wiggling as it sat up and sleepily scented the air.

Keith pressed his cheek to the grass and offered it his fingertips, which it came forward on its front paws to sniff. He knew that it belonged to someone. Normally, the thought would cut at him, make him retreat inside himself, resentful. But the stars had a calming effect on Keith. For the first time since he’d arrived at the Garrison, he felt grounded, centered.

“Hey, buddy,” Keith whispered. The whimsicott finished nosing at his fingers, then diverted elsewhere, to his ear, which—wow. Wet _and_ cold. “Okay, hey, don’t do that.”

Somehow, it managed to wiggle its head under Keith’s, and didn’t let up until his neck was supported by the cottony fur along its back. Sufficiently made into a pillow, it snuffled, satisfied, and fell asleep again.

Just when Keith thought he could return his attention to the light show above, new weight pressed against his side. He tipped his chin the barest amount so as to not disturb whimsicott, and saw that a wurmple had curled in the fold of his jacket, where the fabric pooled in the grass by his hip. Large eyes drooping closed, the wurmple sighed.

His company was unexpected, but as guarded as Keith was, he understood the vulnerability and trust their presence implied. A short-lived smile undid the hard line of his mouth. And, careful, he unclipped the pokéball from his belt and brought it toward his face. The bright red metal had deepened to maroon in the dim light, though as the simulation on the roof shot imaginary comets across the sky, their reflection warped upon the pokéball’s surface. He ran a thumb around the seam, avoiding the button at its front.

There were so many things in Keith’s life that he wished he could go back and change. Whimsical as it may have been, if he had that option, he’d make it so that he failed one less person than he already had. Still, he didn’t know who he would choose. His partner, or—

His mom.

The thing about space that Keith had always found most comforting was the idea that its furthest reaches would never be completely knowable. To think, something so pivotal as the universe they all lived in could remain fervently ill-defined, and yet continue to expand outward without the need for real meaning. So much of what waited out there would never be named or described, while so much more would never exist, not even for an instant, in the light of distant giants.

Keith was okay with that—the never knowing. If the universe didn’t fully know itself, why should he? The anger that festered inside him was not the only thing in the universe that was provided the means to form but no purpose except, really, to simply be. He’d decided that he was better off on his own a long time ago, but thinking about space, and everything waiting to be found out there? Most nights it made him feel not quite so alone.

So yes, Keith took comfort in that. He didn’t think there were pieces of himself that were missing because, just maybe, _he_ was the missing piece, and up there, the universe would gladly welcome him back.

“Star boy,” spoke a voice from the doorway. Keith jolted, hurrying to push himself up on his elbows in the grass. His pokéball rolled from his hand and landed with a thud somewhere out of sight, while whimsicott, grumbling, retracted its head further under its fluff, and wurmple huffed a yawn. That voice was—Matt’s? “I should warn you that it’s half past eight. Don’t want you to get in trouble for being out after the curfew.”

“I dozed off,” Keith lied. Matt was grinning as he approached, which meant the lie was fated to fail from the start. Mercifully, his chatot was absent.

Matt transferred a stack of books from his arm to the stone lip at the edge of the grass, rustling a bowl of sodden, watered-down pellets with his other. Whimsicott lifted its head at the sound of clinking metal, twitched its horns, and climbed to its feet to investigate. As soon as Matt lowered his hand, the bowl was dragged promptly under whimsicott’s mound of fur and disappeared.

Although Matt hadn’t questioned the nature of how he’d found Keith here, Keith was embarrassed, nevertheless. Beside him, wurmple left the warmth of his jacket to nudge along the grass. It had zeroed in on Keith’s pokéball, which shone brilliantly beneath the simulated meteor shower, and was now using its small mouth to push the ball back to him.

“This is the best place to bring your pokémon to relax,” Matt said in earnest, after Keith had collected the ball and Matt took notice. Seconds later, whimsicott finished gobbling down the food and chirred at Matt, butting its horns gently against his stomach in case he hadn’t heard.

Matt, aggrieved, rolled his eyes and freed the end of his uniform from his belt, using that to wipe the mess from whimsicott’s mouth. He eyed Keith overtop its fur as it chirred a second time—pleased with itself, if Keith had to guess.

“My dad is one of the masterminds behind the science program here. He had this room built with partners like his whimsicott in mind.” Matt’s gaze flicked upward to indicate the roof. “I see you’ve already met her. She has _terrible_ arthritis, if you can believe it.” His grin thinned into a sly smirk. “Still a monster when it comes to cuddles though, but I think you’re more than aware of that.”

Heat warmed the tips of Keith’s ears. To give his hands something to do, he closed his palms around his pokéball and hid it in his lap. Out of sight, out of mind. Hopefully, Matt wouldn’t press the subject.

“And the wurmple?” Keith asked, for lack of anything else to say. The wurmple in question had since abandoned him to claim its share of Matt’s attention. He’d deny it of course, but he was sad to see both pokémon go.

“My mom’s, actually, despite the fact that she’s at home a couple towns away from here. Uncommonly selfless, I know, but whimsicott and wurmple do better together at their age than they do apart.”

Partner separation wasn’t common, but plenty of people spent long spans of time away from their pokémon. Growing up, Keith would hear older folks—those who were well past their prime, that was—prattle on about how you would know when a bond had formed between you and your partner; sort of like a heavy blanket draped across your mind, a dampening of your senses that didn’t necessarily make you aware when your partner was near, but with a strong enough bond you might feel it when they weren’t, much like a phantom limb that had been lost. There could sometimes be consequences in the event of incredible circumstance, but the evidence was spotty, and rarely talked about. Pokémon were animals. There was nothing magic about that.

“I’m glad,” Keith said, drawn to the sight of them. “That they have eachother.”

Whimsicott, having returned to the flowers, nestled atop the leaves where wurmple lay coiled. Before long, all that could be seen of the two was off-white fur, the shift of it soon rhythmic as whimsicott’s breathing dropped off in sleep.

“Crazy how adaptable they are, you know? It’s an exemplary upshot of evolution they’ve perfected over millennia,” Matt conceded, nodding as though this were a conclusive assertion on the level of Plato or Socrates. “Back home, my little sister went behind my back and taught chatot to sing Rick Astley’s most _dangerous_.” He snorted. “I got way more mileage out of that one than she did.”

Reluctant to leave, but knowing full well that he should get up before he grew too comfortable, Keith slid to the edge of the grass and stood. Matt steadied him with a touch to his elbow, then moved to gather the empty bowl and his books.

For a brief few seconds, the spines of the books were visible. Keith titled his head to catch a glimpse of the titles. All of them mentioned Pluto. “Light reading before bed?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Matt deflected easily. “It’s for the project my team was assigned last month. Um, not that it’s something the whole Garrison knows right now. We’re still months away from announcing anything. Development on the tech is going to take time, and there’s so much _math_ involved in space travel. Dude, math is my absolute favorite.”

“You’re going on a mission,” Keith breathed out slowly, quiet and unconsciously reverent. Then he frowned, remembering that he’d met Matt by the commissary. “I thought you were in the flight program.”

“Ha, no. Imagine _me_ as a pilot.” Matt shook his head, and together, they began the walk to the dormitories. “I graduated from science a while ago. We don’t get the uniform upgrade that you will when you become a flight officer.” A long-suffering raspberry left Matt’s mouth as he exhaled. “The orange has kind of grown on me, to be honest.”

“But you were reading the assignment list for the flight cadets,” Keith pointed out, blunter than he would have liked.

“Yeah, that.” Matt scratched his hair, his eyes quick to bounce away from Keith’s. They fixated on something in the middle distance. “Just a favor I did for a superior officer while I was in the area. He asked me to look up one of the new cadets, not sure why. But hey, he’s going to be on that mission with me. Can’t say I mind when he’s the one asking. I’d give anything to be, like, a fraction as cool as him.”

Keith could ignore the deflection, but now he _wondered..._

“This your stop?” Matt knocked his head toward one side of the forked hallway, where a sign on the wall indicated the direction of the freshman dorms. “Listen. Star boy. Let me know the next time you want to check out that sim room again. There’s more to it than you think.”

“I have a name,” he grumbled.

“Oh?” Matt grinned, already moving down the other hall. He walked backward for long enough to say, “Wouldn’t know it, star boy.”

Before Matt could disappear from sight, Keith shouted after him, “It’s Keith!”

Grudging, Keith crossed his arms and accepted that this was now his lot in life whether he liked it or not. Though he had the distinct feeling that the possibilities weren’t going to leave him be tonight—if the Garrison’s next mission involved Pluto, Keith thought, smile soft, he could hardly begin to imagine what awaited them there.

_One day that'll be you._

Of course, the sim in the planetarium’s roof had been as breathtaking as it was beautiful. But the real thing? That would be so much more, and it was this promise, drawing closer by the day, that would always keep Keith going.


	5. tangent to our own

People Keith’s age were a quandary. The sum of their years would not shape them into fledgling adults until late adolescence, and yet, no longer could they fall back on the precarious barrier of prepubescence that, once crossed, had marked them as more than kids. Rather, it appeared they were stuck somewhere tender between ignorance and an event horizon fast approaching. To them, childhood was too fresh in their minds to be dismissed with anything but the fervid goodbye they’d long hoped and yearned for; indifferent to what Keith mourned as the inevitable surrender of a fragmented reverie.

Keith wouldn’t grow old like them. He wouldn’t one day find himself in his thirties, nostalgic for a swaddled youth where good times outnumbered the bad. And that was because, in truth, he’d never be able to leave his childhood behind.

Though Keith didn’t dream often, when he did, he dreamt in memories; the kind that clung to the fabric of his atoms, embedded themselves into the cells and sinew from which the injured parts of him would always regrow. Something his dad used to say was that Keith had the memory of an elephant—a tusked and embittered donphan that refused to forget a face, much less the many ways in which it’d been wronged and maimed. But the reality was that Keith’s memory was as shit as they came. He just so happened to build the one significant relationship in his life with someone he’d spend so much of it chasing after. That, for Keith, began the day he toddled his first steps with no one but nidorino to urge his stumbling legs forward, slippery palms fumbling for the pokémon’s horn in his fight to reach the kitchen doorway; all while, on the other side, his dad had fiddled with a satellite radio to the sound of unresponsive static.

Remembering the things his dad did and didn’t do over the years was easy. Keith’s world was narrowed, and so small that his dad, for the longest time, was all he had. His _mom,_ however—that was where his memory unraveled. He couldn’t say for certain if he shared the shape of her face or the slope of her nose; whether scattered flecks of grey had marred the lurid violet of her eyes as surely as they did Keith’s own, or if he’d tricked his mind into believing as little as that. He accepted that these details shouldn’t matter. But as many times as Keith roused during the night to sweat-soaked sheets and a fading recollection of her voice in his head, resounding through his skull as though she’d just spoken, not sung him to sleep a decade and a half before, Keith wanted at least one of them to be true.

That memory, along with a strange knife and the partner she chose for him, was all he had left of her. The words to her songs were lost to time, but with their echo came the ghost of old emotion they’d once imparted upon him. Call it instinct, a confusing sense of understanding that had slept dormant within him ever since; her singing filled Keith with singular clarity, ringing, undiluted and pure, like some spaceborn metal that had turned molten light-years before entering earth’s atmosphere and crashing inside of a comet.

A part of him argued that nothing about this was normal. Yet from the moment he allowed himself to pause, breath stalling as he truly listened... it felt right. The nights Keith dreamt of his mom’s singing were the nights where he wanted to escape this world most badly, where he couldn’t help but lie awake until the dawn, counting the stars outside his window as each waned from view and pretending, for a little while, that he’d someday follow. That clarity was the closest he would ever come to naming the thing his heart desired—his purpose for existing, what _any_ of this could possibly have meant.

The older Keith got, the more disillusioned he became with the concept of chance. _What were the chances,_ his thoughts were often given to snarling, _that those dominos fell they way they had, and you’re where you are now?_

Chance did not explain why his mom left.

But, maybe, it accounted for everything that came after.

Bright and early Monday morning, chance was the very last thing on Keith’s mind as he took his inaugural steps inside a simulator pod. The clunk of his boots on the grating preceded the initializing hum of the central console, and seconds later, a spitting flicker of screens and digital displays sliced apart the darkness at the helm. He walked the perimeter, fingers slow to skim the demarcated station hubs, while behind him, the engineer and communications specialist assigned to his crew for the duration of the semester climbed aboard.

Keith recognized Hunk by virtue of the headband tied in the engineer’s hair, but the comm spec was a new face. _Maret,_ she husked when they introduced themselves at the start of today’s joint class, a scandinavian intonation scraping her voice along the lower end of her register. She was petite next to Hunk, though comparably muscled beneath the sleeves of her uniform where the material pulled taut over defined biceps. The slanted trim to Maret’s platinum bob followed the cut of her jaw; in spite of this, the sharpness it lent her features was offset by the pear-shaped birthmark that swallowed all but a third of the underside of her chin. She seemed the type who spoke when necessary and seldom anytime else. Keith respected that; more to fact, he was relieved by it. They would be testing together for the quarterly practicals and the midterm, and that meant their individual grades were contingent on their ability to function as a team. The less friendly they were to each other, the smoother this all would be in the long run.

Still, as the afternoon drew near, Keith couldn’t escape the feeling that the walls of the Garrison were closing in around him. Introductory Combat, known to most as Basic, would be holding its opening class the second period after lunch, and wasn’t that just _perfect._ Self-hatred nested in his windpipe, a building fit of tension that grew to abutt his esophagus, and with every pull of air through his locked teeth, stabbed deeper. He likened the sensation to a black hole formed in the crush of a vacuum; run aground, it would upset the negative pressure which constituted the delicate outer membrane of his lungs, hemorrhage his vital organs, then demolish the carnage inward.

_Your partner is unstable and it’s all your fault. What makes you think you aren’t unstable, too?_

What more, after introductions had been made amongst their assigned crews and the flurry of conversation in the room abated, Keith’s team was the first that Iverson called forward. Though the class was only training in the simulator today, the thought of making a mistake during the practice sim agitated the nervous energy accumulating beneath his skin. Keith burned to prove that his performance in the placement test hadn’t been some fluke. That he deserved a place here, not as a consequence of circumstance beyond his control, but because this was _his choice,_ and his alone.

Keith’s emotions were dynamite, failure his perilously short fuse. His admission to the Garrison had given him what felt like purpose for the first time in his life. He’d fought for that right every step of the last couple years, and, dreading that he might wake tomorrow to discover this was all a dream, he resolved to hold on that much harder.

The simulation they were practicing today was a straightforward scenario. Soon after the digital displays fizzled to life, landscape distinctly lunar in nature blipped across the helm’s anterior windows. The spatial capacity of Galaxy Garrison sim tech was daunting in its own right, but for something so powerful, the handful of clicks the console took to stutter on were telling. _Worth it,_ thought Keith, more inclined to be amused by the hiccup. A wrinkle of static which wouldn’t have been out of place on a deteriorating tape cassette raced up the windows, and promptly, the landscape finished rendering and enhanced. He admired the tech in the pod—practically speaking, his _ship_ —no less now than he had the night before, when he’d gazed skyward through the planetarium roof and fallen victim to its captivating spell.

Again, Keith took his time drinking in the visceral imagery. A scabrous outcrop, flaked with sediment in luminous tones of rust and apricot, stretched two hundred feet ahead, after which the bedrock gave way to a cliff. This terrain was alien, to be sure, but upon further study, Keith had to stifle a snort. Its consistency was evocative of the off-brand fake snow unique to smalltown hardware stores.

Iverson went over the assignment and mission protocols the previous class. As pilot, Keith had to get the ship through the canyon ahead, skirting foreign detection at higher altitudes and potential structural upshoots that rose from the dried reservoir bed. Meanwhile, Maret’s task was to triangulate coordinates for a coded message; specifically, critical intelligence sent direct from allied fighters stationed in orbit. To exacerbate the stakes, the frequency they were after had a sensitive range, a complication of local perturbation within the moon’s meager magnetic field and its proximity to the planet it circled as a satellite. Until Maret pinpointed those coordinates, Keith would be flying blind.

 _Precision,_ Iverson emphasized, _is the method and not the goal._

“Galaxy Garrison, Flight Log 8-17-12,” Keith announced as he situated himself in the pilot chair and molded his palms to the grips framing the wheel. He pushed a drawn-out exhalation from his nose, then tilted the throttle forward in tight increments. It would be thirty seconds, less, before the ship devoured the distance between here and the cliff. “Begin ascent from Ganymede for intelligence retrieval.”

The ship hit the cliff edge, and down they went.

“Okay, _wow._ Am I the only one seeing this?” Hunk’s knuckles were white from how hard he was squeezing his seat harness. His shout was the sole noise not lost beneath the deafening bellow of the thrusters. “Sharp. _Jagged_ and sharp!”

Once the ship had tipped in freefall, the topography of the canyon floor sprung into immediate view of the windows. Irregular chemical reactivity in the thin atmosphere scattered the lunar surface with glowing phosphorescence, but where the reservoir had receded, dropping temperatures claimed what remained. Splintered pillars of ice a deep and consuming blue jutted from the crust like the incisors of a monstrous maw.

Keith inhaled, harsh this time, and shoved back on the controls. Adrenaline spiked his blood with feral heat, the rush of it up his neck leaving livid blisters in the synaptic space between his motor neurons. The tallest among the formations were at least a thousand feet, but that was the rule, not the exception. Neither was there any conceivable pattern to their forested clustering. The ship arced upward in a reverse bell-curve that wrenched Keith flush against his seat, thrust inversion jolting through the wings and rattling the metal buckles of their harnesses. It was close, carelessly so, but Keith managed to avoid a looming peak by the skin of his teeth and clear a line of ascent.

“Watch our altitude,” Maret warned. She swiped at a diagnostic screen pulsing in the corner of his eye. Instantly, the screen detached from the comm hub and flew to Hunk, who released his harness to clutch at the monitor instead.

“Fuel capacity ninety-six percent. We’re free of detection at least another hundred feet. Eighty,” Hunk counted, voice rising several octaves as that number shrunk fast. “Sixty. Forty—”

Keith didn’t lighten up on the accelerator. Instead, he swung vertical, tearing along the height of the next pillar he deftly evaded. _Just a little higher,_ he promised, his nerves vibrating much as super-charged electrons might. _We’re almost there._ Where the pillar tapered into the sallow sky overhead, Ganymede’s trailing hemisphere, rich in sulfur dioxide, beckoned. The adrenaline in his bloodstream ignited like a lit match to oil, and he refused to waver, determined not to resign himself to repeated failures. But what Keith didn’t realize was this: he hadn’t been in his right mind all morning, and that made him dangerously reckless.

_You are destabilizing in front of a captive audience. How long until you are eviscerated by your own hand, and straining for relief, the internal pressure blows through your abdomen to gouge hapless gore at your feet?_

Under the lip of Keith’s uniform, his pokéball lay trapped between an armrest and the defiant wall of his body heat. Familiar numbness clamored for his skin despite the intervening cloth, its sting uniquely metallic and akin to corrosion that moved to feast downwind of his ribs.

_Almost there, almost—_

A trio of beeps screeched through the helm.

“Pinged.” Maret’s fingers attacked the radar and pulled a series of prompts down the navigation panel. When she cut Keith a look, breath whistled from her parted mouth. “Here, but no farther.”

“Fifty feet,” Keith argued. “Fifty and we’re out.”

Due to the nature of the mission, this airspace was subject to enemy surveillance at undisclosed altitudes. Garrison tech outcompeted any other, meaning if Maret’s detectors pinged, the ship would soon be a sitting duck. Keith’s heart thumped out of rhythm with his pounding veins, and suddenly there was a frantic voice, not quite his own, fluttering at the base of his skull and begging him to listen. Instinct had never let Keith down, but here he was, ignoring it in favor of outrunning some crude amalgamation of his fear. It was a paradox; escape, in this scenario, was equivalent to willful defeat.

He had no choice. Either he continued navigating the ice field, or he sacrificed the mission.

“Hold onto something!” Keith jerked the wheel as far as it would turn and sent the ship spiralling, diving beneath a pair of pillars that had buckled together to form an arch.

Behind Keith, someone dry-heaved, and he heard what sounded like Hunk’s anguished moan. “I’m—wait.” Turbulence shook the ship. “Yeah. Uh huh. Definitely gonna be sick.”

Just then, Maret beat her chest with her fist. _“Aha._ Found you.” Her smile was wicked in the reflection of her screen. A series of triangular markers materialized on the comm map, zeroing in on numerical coordinates lying several leagues ahead. Keith cast her a glance, his mouth opening to speak. She was _fast._ But this was neither the time nor the place to admit he was impressed.

Maret caught his eye, shifted her chin. Something about the subtle dimple of muscle in the hinge of her cheek told Keith that she already knew. “I will keep a lock from here. All you, pilot.” She tossed him a three-fingered salute.

Maybe if Keith hadn’t brought the pokéball along to the sim, his focus wouldn’t be split between the mission and his nebulous standing at the Garrison. He may not know now what would happen when he entered that combat classroom—

But Keith was _not_ going to roll over onto his back, exposing belly soft and shivering, with intent to be slit open. Not now, and certainly not ever. For once, all the progress he’d made here would lead to somewhere other than ruin. It _had_ to.

The path Keith weaved was looser than he would have liked. And so it was luck, really, that he tightened his trajectory in time to flip the ship lateral, flanking another massive pillar which came hurtling around the next bend. The breadth separating titanium and ice was measurable in inches; however, Keith’s attention snagged elsewhere. A strip of uniform, freed from his belt when momentum had dragged him along his seat, allowed naked skin to catch inside the clips securing his pokéball there. Distracted, Keith was woefully unprepared for the sudden sucker-punch of force which struck abreast the ship’s left wing. A violent spasm bore through the hull, and when his chest slammed upward to meet his harness, so too did his jaw into his upperlying molars. Sprays of ice shattered against the port-side windows.

“The hell—?” Keith scrambled to regain control of the wheel as the ship careened downward.

“Left wing integrity sixty-six percent. Holy—you guys, I think that was an energy detonator!” Hunk supplied, panicky and wheezy, eyes scanning the screen in his hands. “This canyon is a _minefield.”_

Shit—the _ice._ The detonators must have been planted high enough on the pillars to destroy their structural cores upon triggering then send them toppling to the reservoir bed. There was no telling which ones were rigged to blow from visual alone, and Keith, well aware that this ship couldn’t survive much more damage, guessed the risk would only worsen as they approached the coordinates.

“Hunk,” Keith started, swallowing thickly and tasting iron. In all likelihood, he’d mangled his tongue when the blast hit. “Is there any way that you can track them?”

“Gimme a sec, I think I can alter the frequency of the ship transmitter—we could detonate them ahead of our course!”

To buy Hunk time, Keith reversed thrusters, circling the ship around to where the initial denotation had nearly taken them down, and pried stiff fingers off the wheel to briefly attempt excavating the meat from his thighs. The counter on the coordinate map kept ticking. He would have to play this smart. Outside, nearby pillars crosshatched the canyon’s glowing orange-gold backdrop, greedily reabsorbing any and all light emitted from Ganymede’s surface. Keith could imagine how the reservoir had once looked: water darker than the open oceans of earth, hungering for radiation that reached this moon from far-out space.

He had to physically shake himself to chase the image from his head. The adrenaline hadn’t yet left him; in fact, its buzz was more insistent. _Just don’t think,_ he told himself, antsy. _No more distractions. You’re a pilot. Act like it._

As soon as Hunk gave Keith the go-ahead, he shoved the accelerator flat and made up for lost minutes. Keith’s vision tunneled as he fully lapsed into his instincts. And after all sound beyond the ship had muted, he found bliss in the silence. True to Hunk’s word, the first detonator triggered not ten seconds later, sparking a plume of smoke that felled a pillar at thirty feet out. Then came a second, a third and a fourth—so close to nicking the ship as each pillar plummeted that dizzying aftershocks were sent rippling through Keith’s bones. Still, he heard nothing but white noise.

The wings of the ship cleaved smoke clouds without resistance, and on the subsequent upstroke, they emerged to an enclosed clearing. Or what appeared to be one, shadowed beneath a canopy of crystallized ice—a ring of pillars that converged at one central point high overhead.

Maret hummed approval at the sight, and the comm map did the same. “Up there!”

 _“No way,”_ Hunk hurried to interject, “Our angle is bad. Real, real bad. If even one of those walls of ice is packing a detonator, we’re toast.”

Unheeding, Keith had already swerved the ship upward, gaining altitude fast. The map pulsated to indicate the coordinates lay at the dome’s apex. Get in and get out. Simple as that.

“Keith, no!” Whether that voice belonged to Hunk or Maret, it didn't matter seconds later, when two detonations sizzled into the air at once, the resulting flashbangs jarring the ship and flooding the windows with smoke. There Keith heard it: a snap like a gunshot.

Keith twisted the wheel at the signal. The ship somersaulted, and an avalanche of black shards and shrapnel ripped through the haze where they'd been moments before. He circled again, dipping in and out of smoke trails to climb higher toward the sliver of open sky.

The map hummed a more decisive note, and Maret, nails digging rough lines in her armrests, released the leather to initiate the comm link. If they only had one attempt to grab the transmission, Keith had to trust she’d be ready.

He heard the crack before he saw it—directly above the ship and their approaching target, the peak of a curved pillar began to creak ominously in the wake of the last blast. An enormous fissure streaked across its girth, snapping it from its mooring, and before Keith could catch his breath, it began rapidly descending straight for them.

Hesitating, Maret’s grip loosened on the controls at her station.

“Be ready to intercept,” Keith threw over his shoulder, and prayed that she would listen. There was time, still, to fly out of the clearing the same way they’d entered. The broken peak that hurtled downward was too big to otherwise evade, but they were running out of time. He couldn’t justify wasting valuable minutes—the difference between life and death—on second tries. So close to their goal, Keith wasn’t about to back down. _He could do this._

 _“Pilot,”_ Maret hissed. “This is—” Her words were lost beneath the drumbeat in Keith’s ears as he raced to meet the falling ice at incredible speed. He eyed the plunging coordinate counter, bracing himself for a crash that would be more real, intimate, than any he’d ever experienced prior.

_This is suicide._

Black ice blotted out his window, and in it, Keith saw a minute flicker of silver-white, there and then gone, as the ship neared impact.

_Mission Failure in three... two..._

Old trauma carved the most persistent wounds. Not since Keith was young had he experienced the spectrum of emotion which separated polar extremes. Nowadays, if he didn’t awake angry, he awoke systematically emptied. He hated those days most, preferring the inebriation of anger to desensitivity, the resulting prickle in his limbs that told of a foreign invader, his own blood _—wrong_ inside his body.

Keith, who fought so hard against the inevitability of imploding, was a pre-stage supernova at his plasmic core. He was too tired to be angry. Trying just made his head throb and his heart fit to scream, but neither could he allow himself to become indifferent in its absence. The acts of chance which had shaped his life formed their fair share of irrevocable casualties. Where others his age might, in passing, consider their circumstances in terms of what-ifs, Keith’s past afflicted him with cyclical regret. _What if I had...? But then, what if I hadn’t?_

Had the tick between this moment and the next defied imminent impact, had it been even a fraction of a second longer—Keith would have contemplated, once more, the ill-fated concept of chance. _What were the chances_ , he would ask himself, neither snarling nor flaunting a narrow show of teeth, but weary, crumbling beneath the weaponized weight of his bones and summarily frightened of collapse. _What were the chances you ended up here?_

“Guys,” Hunk yelled, “we’re not going to make it!”

_“...final message to Galaxy Garrison...mission control, do you read...not going to make it...bridge is compromised, I repeat...”_

Avalanches were kinder than dominos. They gave warning, even if that warning wouldn’t travel far; snowbanks, after all, did not break along their natural spines without conceding so much as a sigh. The day Keith’s dad surrendered a pokéball to his slack hands was the day that he stared his warning square in the face and gladly spat at its feet. It was foolish, but Keith wouldn't realize what was happening until it was already too late. By dawn, his dad’s truck was gone from the garage, the space at the foot of the stairs where nidorino took up residence during the night grown cool.

His dad did that a lot—went away for days at a time before eventually coming back, and for fourteen years, that was irrefutable fact. His dad _always_ came back. Keith wasn’t stupid now, and he wasn’t stupid then. He’d known where his dad was disappearing to since he was eleven years old. He never told his dad how he’d woken to a slamming truck door in the earliest hours one fateful morning, or how he’d stolen the neighbor’s hoverbike to tail his dad across city limits. There was a secret waiting out there in the desert, but par for the course of a universe hell-bent on disappointing Keith, that secret amounted to a shack in shambles, long abandoned to the dunes and to disrepair.

Keith had warred with his curiosity all these years since, but then a month passed after his dad gave him the pokéball, and strangely, his dad had yet to come back. Before he realized where his legs were taking him, Keith returned to the desert to search for that shack again. It was as though the grief that had always been synonymous with his scars knocked loose from his sternum and altered the circuitry in his veins. All he need do was step foot into the desert, then a homesick magnetism had directed him south until the shack emerged from the sands.

The entrance sat slightly ajar. Stale air greeted him at the door, though curiously, the space ran rather warm. A closet aside the corner kitchenette concealed a chugging radiator. There, movement slid beneath shadow, and a wild seviper, girth swollen gravid with eggs, uncoiled from the pipes to reveal dropped fangs. Truthfully, she had more claim to this place than Keith did. He placated her with lowered, upturned hands, telegraphed his retreat, and closed the door behind him.

As dark fell over the desert, Keith picked through gutted detritus no different than the odds and ends which had littered their home since before he could walk. However, this mess was disorganized in comparison, incongruous with how his dad worked. Crazy as the notion was, the only other explanation was that someone else had been here. But what could they have possibly been searching for, he wondered, when there was nothing of value to take? Upstairs, a mattress and table crowded the shallow attic, the former stripped bare while the latter was strewn in eclectic manner. Among stripped screws and clips of burnt wiring lay a handheld radio at best seventy years out of production.

_What were the chances..._

A fleeting second before Keith crashed the simulator, chance was the very last thing on his mind. He remembered, though, how he arrived at the chair in which he now sat, a pilot in all but name. It was the radio he found in the shack that night—the only radio his dad was ever able to fix.

Keith could recall how his confusion had tasted—acrid, a liquid pill burst prematurely whilst sinking down his gullet—that moment he depressed a button along the side of the radio, unthinking, as he retrieved it from the table. His eyes had since adjusted to the dark; when the screen lit yellow, even faint, he startled and tripped backward to land with a soft _whumpf_ atop the mattress. There he turned the radio over in his hands, noting the care his dad took in cleaning the grit from the aged speakers, and for the next hour, became engrossed in tuning the old-fashioned dial.

_“...this is...come in...are you out there...?”_

Although what the radio had picked up was garbled, at first unintelligible and thick with static, the pads of Keith’s fingers paused upon the dial. He’d come to the realization that, this time, his dad had abandoned him for good. His emotional and physical exhaustion whittled the slurried static into a knife, and the longer it buzzed, the more grey matter it scraped from his ears. Still his gut had stayed his hand. Somehow this was important, and Keith couldn’t risk losing the channel.

“ _...this is call sign patience-zero-three...Galaxy Garrison come in, are you—_ ”

The static pitched and rolled until a mechanical shriek pierced the speaker, causing Keith to fumble the radio and swallow hard. His breath shuddered raggedly in his lungs, and when he glanced around, unsure of _why,_ the attic was quiet and dark.

 _“...electrical fire in the compartment...storm is worsening and I can’t see...,”_ said the voice, each repetition painstaking, concise. _“...forty million miles away...”_

The scratch of the transmission caught at Keith, slipped somewhere supple inside him where the give of flesh and arteries allowed it to wedge between his ribs, a snapped arrowhead that found solace in the steady pump-suck of blood to and from his heart. Like a lost piece of the universe that sensed in him its brother, it sought to be closer. And in doing so, it split Keith wide open. Not a drop of desperation leaked into the channel, and yet he _knew_ that sound. It was acceptance, however regretful, of defeat.

“ _...there was a malfunction, an electrical fire...can’t see the surface of Mars from orbit...”_ The static crackled, and Keith would swear until the day he died—that was laughter, muddled from the vast distance of space it had travelled to reach earth, and which came all that way just to live for the briefest instant in the cradle of Keith’s hands. _“...if you read me, earth, we are forty million miles...status is critical. My crew won’t live if I don’t...”_

“I’m here,” Keith rasped into the empty room, unaware of the raw emotion that threatened to fuse his throat shut. The desert was cold tonight, the walls of the shack thin. He pushed himself into the corner of the mattress and curled into his knees, unable to look away from the radio and the one other person who must have felt as alone in the universe as Keith did now. “I’m listening. Don’t go.”

 _“They say you feel it when your partner dies, but I don’t—I don’t know how bad she’s...”_ A murmur, low and private, _“Stay with me, spina—”_

Another shriek sliced through the transmission, and the channel exploded with interference. The voice, when it returned, was no longer calm. Still, the words rang clear:

_“...final message to Galaxy Garrison...mission control, do you read...not going to make it...bridge is compromised, I repeat...”_

Hot tears gathered in Keith’s eyes, burning impressions into his shuttered lids which would linger long after he had furiously wiped them away. A reminder: _you are only as helpless as you allow yourself to be._

“I’m here,” Keith croaked, aching for an answer that would never come.

 _“I’m their pilot._ ” An exhale trembled fuzzily beneath layers of interference. “ _I won’t let them—”_

Silence, and the channel went dead.

A week later, a military institution that specialized in space exploration made the local news station. The same night that Keith had gone looking for his dad and found the shack, a manned scientific mission to Mars experienced an electrical malfunction when returning to orbit at the edge of an unpredicted storm. The fire that sparked as a result tore a hole in the shuttle’s hull and incapacitated every crew member aside from the pilot. Main power was lost soon after, and it fell upon the pilot to manually reroute the oxygen system, to risk being pulled out to space in order to seal off the damaged sector.

Not one life was lost, and the pilot was hailed as a hero.

But none of the news coverage spoke of a transmission that reached earth minutes before the shuttle lost power, and no matter where Keith searched, neither was there a mention of the pilot’s name. Keith was the only one who would ever know how _scared_ the pilot was that night. Who would have believed Keith anyway? Radios weren’t built to intercept interstellar transmissions. It just wasn’t possible.

Nevertheless, that night had changed Keith. He’d stayed by the radio for hours, exhausted, hardly functioning, but unwilling to give in to sleep lest the pilot attempt to make contact again. He couldn’t help but fantasize scenarios in which the pilot had heard him and was comforted by Keith’s single-minded confidence in his survival. Because Keith, and no one else, had caught the pilot’s transmission. That fact was significant—he just didn’t understand how, or why.

When Keith finally learned of the Galaxy Garrison, and by extent the pilot’s fate, he thought he might be beginning to. Space had always called out to Keith, but never had that call been instilled with such intrinsic need. _No one_ needed Keith, but for just a moment—that pilot did. And Keith, helpless, hated how he was unable to do a thing. It strengthened Keith’s resolve to become at least half the pilot they were, and pointed him to the Garrison, the direction that finally felt right.

 _Maybe we’re not so different,_ thought Keith, soothing the doubt whose deep roots had infected his body more than a decade before. _Maybe this is the universe telling me I’m needed out there, and someday, I’ll be that pilot, lost amongst the stars._

Keith was a cadet now, but he was ashamed by how much he fell short of that hope. Just as he couldn’t fully turn his back on his past, he couldn’t abandon his partner.

If that would lead to Keith’s downfall, so be it.

His eyes fluttered closed, and unafraid, he began to count.

_One..._

The comm hummed a short, expressive sound. Breathless, Maret shouted, “Keith!”

Transmission retrieved, he wretched the controls sideways. The ship arced and cut away from the incoming ice at the last possible second. Between one moment and the next, the helm was plunged into darkness. Every window and screen on the ship cut to black, then a ding sounded over the comm.

 _Simulation Cleared,_ the main window read when Keith dared to crack open his eyes.

Dazed, he glanced to Maret, who had thrown an elbow over the back of her chair to send him a reproachful glower. “Good save. Warn us next time, ja?”  

She filed out of the pod first, followed by Hunk and Keith—after, of course, the engineer had wobbled and righted himself while hanging off Keith’s shoulder.

Iverson was waiting for them on the gangway. Already, a hushed murmur had risen among the other cadets. It petered out when Iverson cleared his throat.

Though his arms were crossed at his back and his stern brow was lowered considerably, there was that astonishment again, the same Keith saw when he’d finished the placement test, written clear as day on the instructor’s face.

“Impeccable time, cadets,” Iverson grunted as Keith’s team lined up in front of the class. His steely gaze passed over Maret and Hunk, but lingered, for a time, once he reached Keith. “In all my years, yours is the fastest I’ve seen clear Ganymede in one piece. Congratulations.” Iverson nodded his approval, and Keith, unaware he was holding his breath, exhaled in a rush.

But Iverson didn’t stop there. “Now, let me be clear. It takes more than a skilled pilot to carry a mission. Pilots have the final say in the lives of their crew, which is why communication between individuals on any mission is critical to its success. As you just saw, when that communication broke down, the comm spec hesitated.” He turned his hardened expression on Keith. “I expect the concerns of your crew will be taken into consideration during the real test, cadet.”

These final words were the ones Keith carried with him the rest of the morning. More than anything, he wished he could have argued the point. Maret had hesitated, sure, but she’d managed to nab the transmission despite the danger. She was like Keith, in that way—dedicated to the very end. Keith trusted her to get the job done, and she’d trusted him just the same. He hadn’t seen a need to muddy the waters with a public forum, and for his team, well, it _worked._

Still, the reprimand burned Keith to his core. By the time the lunch period rolled around, his fists had begun to shake, a tell-tale sign that he would do well to hit the gym if he wanted to cool off before his combat class. The nervous energy thrumming underneath his skin was reaching its breaking point, and he feared the relief of punching a bag wouldn’t be enough this time.

Or at least, Keith thought as much an hour later, sucking in gulps of air between guzzled sips of water, the bottle squeezed tight in his hands as he stepped off the mat and headed for the showers. For the most part, the gym was empty. Most cadets were busy filling their stomachs. Keith, meanwhile, couldn’t have kept as little fare as crackers down. His body was rebelling against him. And, wrung out from the practice sim, he barely made it into the locker room before he slumped onto a bench and bent to press his forehead to his knees.

Sweat coated the sides of his face and drenched his unruly hair, thickest over the bend of his neck where the room’s humidity served to curl it further. With the stubborn tension in his limbs distracting him, Keith didn’t at first hear the shower going on the far side of the room. That was, until a tug in the vicinity of his shoelaces drew him from his own head, and he registered someone’s quiet singing.

Low and rough, the voice drifted from the furthest stall down the line. Its throaty melody melded seamlessly with the locker room’s distinctive acoustics. A warmth unfurled in Keith’s chest like a blossom under the desert sun, and as he listened, transfixed, the buzz finally fled his body and left him drained. He didn’t recognize the song, though he tried his best to follow the words. Still, a wave of eerie vertigo danced across his skin, and instinctively, he knew he must have heard it somewhere before.

Another tug returned Keith’s attention to his shoes. His mind, melted to goop in the span of a second, was too sluggish to startle at the sight that greeted him there. A pokémon had insinuated itself into the space between Keith’s feet. _Spinarak,_ Keith acknowledged distantly, the thought lapping at the corners of his brain like the creep of a tide along a foggy beach. _A blue spinarak._ The spinarak’s head and abdomen were pale as a cloudless sky, and at present, its mandibles were nibbling at the laces of Keith’s shoes. Though much like Keith, it seemed to grow lax as the song went on. Eventually spinarak’s dark eyes drooped, and it deflated within the crook of his shoes.

Neither he nor the pokémon stirred when the singing cut off altogether, and subsequently the water which stopped soon after. Looking back, that was ample indication that Keith should have come to his senses. It would have saved him the embarrassment, in any case, when the guy who had ambushed him in the gym the other night stepped out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist.

And Keith, well—

Moments before he choked on a yelp and tumbled off the bench, Keith got an eyeful of seriously toned chest.


End file.
